[mikeocool]

Reading the comments and posts about both Claude Code and Codex on Reddit (and often hacker news), it’s hard to imagine they’re not extremely astroturfed.

There seems to be constant stream of not terribly interesting or unique “my Claude code/codex success story” blog posts that mange to solicit so many upvotes.

[nl]

I dunno.

I've been coding for 30 years.

Using Codex I'm finally enjoying it again for the first time in maybe 15 years. Outsource all that annoying part? Heck yeah - bring it on.

And I tell everyone I can how transformational it has been for me.

[jxf]

Did you also use Claude, and you like Codex better, or are you making a more general observation about the leapfrog in creative power agents are bringing to engineering?

[Aeolun]

I’ll tell you something. I love working with Claude. It’s enthusiastic, it’s nice, it’ll give you suggestions. It’s an all around pleasant experience.

I hate working with codex. It feels like a machine. You tell it to do something, and it just does it. No pretension at being human, or enthusiastic, or anything really.

But codex almost always does it right. And the comments are right, I never run into random usage limits. Codex doesn’t arbitrarily decide to shrink the context window, or start compacting again after 3 messages.

The codex client sucks, claude code is much better. But the codex client is consistent, which is much more important. Claude was amazing 3 months ago. The model is still fine, but the quality of the experience has degraded so far it’s hard to consider using it.

[ragequittah]

This is my experience as well. Codex is very verbose which is annoying considering the limits. My work flow tends to be have Claude code describe the problem (succinct as it can) based on my mashing of the keyboard description of what I want done then send that to codex. I've tried it the other way around doesn't work nearly as good. Disclaimer: not using the 5 prompts per week opus.

[nl]

> The codex client sucks, claude code is much better.

Are you using in in VSCode?

I use the web based Codex (which I love) and the VSCode clients of both. I don't think there is a huge difference in the VSCode plugins.

I've tried the cli versions but don't have enough experience to have a strong opinion.

[elcritch]

Personally I prefer Codex's less-chatty nature nice. I prefer to save my human emotions for humans.

[Aeolun]

I'm totally on board with some people preferring that. I don't. However I do prefer my AI assistant to work.

[nl]

I've used Claude too and I prefer Codex. I generally have confidence in both to tackle large scale problems I won't tackle with Gemini 2.5

I've had a few small bug that Codex has fixed where Claude hasn't.

[mewpmewp2]

Your comment is obviously not AI generated, but since we were talking about astroturfing on Reddit and which presumably is done a lot by bots, it's interesting to me when I read comments on what kind of triggers my inner LLM detector.

> Outsource all that annoying part? Heck yeah - bring it on.

This sentence really and some of your other cadence somehow triggers my sense a lot. Or the comment somehow feels sloganish, formulaic. Not trying to criticise or offend, just thought it's interesting how it triggers this in my brain. And I do agree with you.

[resonious]

I think I'm partly responsible. I've been having a lot of fun with these tools, and so seeing other people doing the same just makes me want to engage even if the discussion isn't particularly sophisticated. I swear I'm not paid to do this (actually I pay out the wazoo for Claude..)

[fragmede]

In life, it helps to be skeptical, so the real question is where do I find real life humans to ask about their experiences? And even then, they could still be paid actors. Though, I've often wondered how would that work. Like, the marketing department staffed by hot people finds developers and then offers to Venmo them $500 to write something nice online about the product? It's a big Internet, and there's a lot of people on Upwork, so I'm not saying it isn't happening, but I've never gotten an email asking me to write something nice about Claude Code in exchange for a couple of bucks.

[100721]

One thing worth taking into account is the practice of finding people who actually like the product, and then paying them to write an honest review. I find this to be much closer to ethical than paying exclusively for positive reviews to people who may not have ever used the product, but it has a similar net effect of distorting the sentiment by amplifying a subset of opinions, so still not ideal but at least it’s rooted in honesty.

If you haven’t been vocal about your support of products in general, you wouldn’t show up on the radar for these “opportunities.”

[fragmede]

I recently got a comma.ai. I really like it. I tell everyone I know to get one. But I'm embarrassed to talk about it on the open Internet because I don't want to be accused of being paid to say good things about them.

I haven't been angling for an opportunity, but the world of marketing to developers isn't the same as for, say, a new face cream.

Paying for a good review on a site that features reviews, eg Amazon or Yelp is one thing. Paying people to troll the Internet at large and make random comments on random sites or discord/etc just seems a bit much.

Then again, the appearance of money make people doubt people are sincere about other things. Specifically, my employer is an AI tech company means that anything pro-AI, even for a different company that's competing with mine, or in a totally different area than my employer's, is suspect.

Human psychology is weird

[eddiewithzato]

Truthfully I find sonnet-4.5 better at Rust code than Codex (medium/high). Haven't tried anything else (like react/typescript) since I only use AI for issues/problems I don't understand.

[ralusek]

> since I only use AI for issues/problems I don't understand

I only use [coding assistants] for problems I DO understand.

[konishipolis]

my suspicion is that much (or at least some) of the negative sentiment towards claude code is from folks that were on it early (when code was even more widely used than codex) and created intensive workflows using it. when anthropic tightened quotas to make it more equitable across plan users they were much more likely to be impacted.

this is obviously pure conjecture, but perhaps the OE folks had automated their multiple roles and now they need to be more involved.

[ffsm8]

Eh, honestly I had some health issues since the vibe coding craze started. Normally I'm one of the people that try things like that out - mostly cuz I don't actually have any hobbies beyond coding and generally find such things funny.

As I got better round June/July I finally found the energy to try it out. It was working incredibly well at the time. It was so fun (for me), that I basically kept playing with it every day after finishing work. So for roughly 1.5 months basically every free minute each day, along with side explorations during work hours when I could get away with it.

Then I had to take another business trip mid August, when I finally came back in September it was unrecognizable - and from my perspective, it definitely hasn't recovered to how ultrathink+opus performed back then.

You can definitely still use it, but you need to take a massively more hands-on approach.

At least my opinion is not swayed by their reduced quota ... But to stay in line with the sentiment analysis this article is about - neither have I tried Codex to this point. Which I will, eventually.

[camel-cdr]

I'm quite confused by the comments you got on this one, surely half of them must be satirical?

[nickstinemates]

Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them. We've built the best way to automate and manage production infrastructure using these models and no one gives a shit. It's so weird.

[100721]

> Meanwhile I am talking about unique shit with Claude Code trying to draft on that sentiment for little to no traction with them.

What does this mean? What do you mean unique shit? What do you mean when you say you’re trying to draft on the sentiment? What is “them” referring to?

Genuinely. I’m not being (deliberately) obtuse, just trying to follow. Thanks

[malshe]

Thanks for asking this because for a moment I thought I was too dense to read this correctly

[typpilol]

Best according to?